The Perfect Night Out: GQ's 25 Best New Restaurants in America, 2014

Anyone hungry? Or rather, is anyone not? American restaurants have figured out what men crave—we want places that slake our appetite, romance the hell out of us, and provide us with a sense of promise and possibility. In 2014, that means elevating Bronx-Italian to four-star quality. It means giving us southern food that has been transformed but is still comforting. And it means visionary chef-auteurs serving up dishes no one has ever imagined—or will soon forget. Gentlemen, your best nights are ahead of you

Not everyone is going to appreciate Pizzeria Vetri for the reasons I do, but then I’m a fussy guy when it comes to pizza crust. To summarize: I’m no fan of the famous pies of Naples, the city considered the bastion of pizza, where every Italian will tell you to go for pizza even if his family runs a pizzeria in his own home town. The problem is that true Neapolitan pies come out of the oven with soft, puffy crusts that turn soggy in seconds.

Chef Marc Vetri, famous for a fine-dining restaurant named after him, has created a neo-Neapolitan crust. It looks Neapolitan. It tastes Neapolitan. But it’s fundamentally different, as though he did DNA research on pizza and eliminated the gene that turns the crust wet. It’s the newest step forward in the evolution of the great American pizza crust, this one light and supple but retaining a smidgeon of crispness.

Most of the effort in fashioning Pizzeria Vetri went into pampering the pizzas. There’s a wood-burning oven and marble counters. Customers, on the other hand, sit at long, wooden communal tables with metal seats, where they’re treated to swell views of the pampered cuisine. They’re also the beneficiaries of an extensive menu that includes salads, desserts, and an unbelievably addictive savory pastry called a rotolo—pizza dough rolled around mortadella and pistachio pesto, then baked until crunchy. The pizza toppings are mostly recognizable, but if you’re daring—and you should trust Vetri—try the Sicilian tuna with mozzarella and tomato sauce. You’ll like it. You can’t help liking it, not with this crust.

Years ago, while writing a profile of David Chang, I learned everything I needed to know about ramen, which is Japanese noodle soup. First he told me it required years of research and untold slurping before a man could understand the complexities. Then he said none of that mattered because everyone “is going to like the ramen they grew up with.”

I’ve been eating chicken noodle soup all of my life, which might be why I’m so taken with Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop—the basis of the broth is chicken, not pork. This is the first American outpost of the emerging Ivan Orkin mini-ramen empire, heretofore found only in Japan. The shop is located in the Gotham West Market, an overachieving food court that one of my friends claims has the best food in Times Square. It almost does, except it’s not really in Times Square, and you have to walk almost a mile from 42nd and Broadway to get there.

The two styles referred to on the menu as “classics” are the Shoyu, which means the broth is seasoned with soy, and the Shio, where the seasoning is Japanese sea salt. If you’re a broth person, order the Shoyu—the soy adds a dimension so rich and disturbingly delicious you might think you’ll never need pork fat again. If you’re a noodle person, have the Shio—the custom-made noodles show off their rye flavor better coming out of the lighter broth. Both versions came with shredded scallions and a soft, mild, chunk of pork.

Just as comforting as the ramen is the whitefish rice bowl, also quite New York. The cold smoked whitefish (a New York staple) combined with the warm, sweetly seasoned rice tasted like freeform sushi, and an extra jolt of pleasure came from the juicy, marinated salmon roe on top. The Ivan Ramen chain has come to the city where it belongs.

I loved the difficulty of driving to a restaurant that’s within the Seattle city limits but requires all the twists, turns and maneuvers you’d experience finding your way to a trattoria in the hills of Liguria. I wasn’t so thrilled with the parking opportunities—there’s allegedly a lot, but I couldn’t locate it, so I left my car alongside the road and was happy not to have a ticket when I came out. (Maybe the cops can’t find the place either.)

Westward is worth the trip for the sheer fun of getting there, and for the view of Lake Union, right outside the door. That will get even better when the weather warms up and you can eat on the huge lakeside patio, seated on an Adirondack chair. The restaurant is entirely casual, inside and out, and offers dishes from all over the world, everything from smoked Manila clam dip to grilled halloumi cheese to Moroccan fish stew. In truth, it’s a little more diversity than the modest kitchen is able to handle. Some of the items are made in a wood-burning oven, which is terrific, and all of them make for pleasant nibbling in the company of friends. The oysters are wonderful, this being the west coast, and I could spend an afternoon eating those Hama Hamas and drinking the Vinho Verde, which went for $24 a bottle.

On the way out, the general manager thanked me for getting lost and calling him for help. He said he had rehearsed exhaustively so he could assist customers, but I was the first to actually get lost—everyone else had GPS.

There’s a mystery to a perfect glass of beer on tap, although you might think there’s nothing to it: Pull the handle, then let go.

I’ve only been interested in beer for about a half-dozen years, so I can’t claim to understand why some beer tastes so much better than the same beer somewhere else. It sure does at Row 34, which calls itself a “workingman’s oyster bar,” even if the room is too shiny and polished to be a hangout for working stiffs, no disrespect to them.

I sat at the counter, ordered oysters and beer, and immediately thought about canceling my other dining reservations for the weekend. You don’t have to eat only oysters. I liked the warm lobster roll, the potted smoked trout, and especially the mashed potatoes with sour cream (exactly the way my father, who was not really a workingman, used to prefer his potatoes). But I kept going back for the same thing, the oysters. I particularly admired the sweet and nutty variety named Row 34. They’re grown in nearby Duury and are exclusive to this restaurant and another owned by the partners. The best bargain was the Howlands Landing oyster, only $2 apiece. There’s a couple dozen beers on tap, all of them pristine and served in pint glasses, tulip glasses, and snifters. I felt like I was in a farm-to-table restaurant, except here, tap-to-table reigns.

Let me say this before I say anything else: You’ll suffer, but for a good cause. Friends going to Sweedeedee told me we’d have to wait, and I told them I didn’t want to wait. I don’t like brunch very much, so why wait around for something you aren’t going to enjoy?

They insisted, dragged me to somewhere in Portland I hadn’t been, and I thought I’d been everywhere. Sweedeedee is a plain little shop with a slamming screen door. When we got there, dozens of people who didn’t know what to do with themselves were doing just that, nothing. I felt like I was in Grand Central Terminal on a day when the trains had stopped running. After an hour, we were led to a table. I ordered the braised beef on grilled brioche with horseradish cream. It sounded good, but I figured nothing could be good enough to justify that wait. It turned out to be the best non-delicatessen sandwich of my life, and I’d put it up against pastrami in a fair fight. The meat, horseradish cream, and bread didn’t simply melt in my mouth. It seemed to sublimate, going from solid to gone in seconds. I don’t remember chewing. I don’t remember breathing. It was like inhaling culinary nitrous oxide. A friend had the egg sandwich. Not much, right? Wrong. The bread, cornmeal molasses, would make Robert E. Lee throw down his sword and surrender.

I couldn’t decide whether Sweedeedee was a great bakery that happened to make superb sandwiches or a supernatural sandwich shop with unbelievable bread. The salted honey pie answered that question. It had a plain, everyday crust, but every crumb tasted like manna. I will forever be grateful to owner Eloise Augustyn for allowing me and my friends to stand around and be miserable so we could all become joyful beyond compare.

When the time comes to have that fabled Last Meal, keep Chi Spacca in mind. I find it hard to believe I walked in, unwary, and walked out, alive.

It looks so innocent—a tiny spot between Osteria Mozza and Mozza2Go once used for occasional family-style dinners, now a restaurant all its own. Chi Spacca is part of L.A.’s tiniest food complex, three side-by-side-by-side shops I think of as Mozza on Melrose, all under the guidance of Nancy Silverton. Where Chi Spacca is concerned, it’s probably more accurate to call her the trail boss. There’s meat here, heaps of it, served in primitive portions by chef Chad Colby, who apparently likes people to eat suicidally. Even when you think a dish might be light, like the focaccia, you end up with Focaccia di Recco, which is made with soft stracchino and turns out to be less like bread and more like a whole cheese pizza.

Everything is beyond normal. The Tomahawk pork chop, all 42 ounces including the best rib bones ever conceived, could have fed our entire table and might have, had I not hogged the bones. The beef and bone marrow pie has an unexpectedly flaky crust, a herd of braised beef, and a marrow bone the size of a smokestack sticking out. It comes with a barrel’s worth of mashed potatoes, or maybe I was hallucinating by then. You can’t escape the onslaught by ordering calamari—it’s supposedly dipped in delicate rice-flour batter, but it arrived Chinese-restaurant style, which means the coating was extra heavy, extra thick. Don’t get me wrong. I love Chi Spacca, even though a better name would have been Avanzi, which means “leftovers.”

The General Muir's "Maven" platter with salmon salad and house-cured lox.

19. The General Muir

Atlanta, GA

**A Real-Deal New York Delicatessen in Atlanta—and We'd Like it Back, **Please

Why isn’t this delicatessen in New York? It belongs in Brooklyn, or the Lower East Side. Well, maybe the Brooklyn or the LES of a half-century ago. Just to be clear, this is an authentic delicatessen, not a deli—one of those shops that slaps together honey ham on a stale roll with a bag of chips. In the evenings, the menu is much like that of any modern, informal restaurant, but at breakfast and lunch, this is an old-school delicatessen, with one exception: The waiters aren’t crusty coots who can’t wait to tell you what’s wrong with their lives. They’re sweet young kids, often blonde and always polite. Somehow, I wasn’t disappointed.

Cel-Ray soda, a New York staple, is available. Instead I began lunch with housemade cucumber-lime soda, the best utilization of a cucumber I’ve come across except when it’s being transformed into a sour pickle. The matzoh ball in the chicken soup is light and fluffy, and the pastrami—nothing is more important than pastrami—is soft, peppery, satisfying, and comes on the rarest of breads, genuine seeded Jewish rye. (Should you be longing for pastrami and find yourself nowhere near Atlanta, here’s a tip: Try the pastrami at Dillman’s in Chicago, another new place.)

If you’re having breakfast at The General Muir, you’ll be pleased to know that the trout is smoked and the lox is cured on premesis. The Nova isn’t, but it was so sterling, blackened around the edges, that I had to admire the restaurant’s sourcing skills. The General Muir has all the dishes that at one time made delicatessens the most wonderful restaurants on earth. At least I always felt that way.

Finally, the sainted Le Bec-Fin space has found what it was looking for, a successor worthy of former chef Georges Perrier. A friend and I managed a quick meal at Avance at the very end of 2013, days after it opened for business under the chef and owner, Justin Bogle, formerly at Gilt in New York. He was ecutive chef there for three years and maintained its Michelin two-star status throughout. The food at Avance was so impressive we wish we could have stayed longer and eaten far more.

The old Le Bec-Fin was an expression of old-world sensibility, gilded and ornate. The new Avance looks Nordic from the outside, terribly serious and monotonal on the inside, with blue and grey walls, grey carpeting, grey banquettes, Edison bulbs screwed into overhead sockets, and a vertical arbor of unexuberant plants. Even the handles of the Laguiole knives are color-coordinated, a perfect matching grey.

I got lucky with the wine list, never easy in Philly, found a eight-year old Meursault for under $80. Bogle’s cooking was absolutely assured, even in those first days on the job. We tried warm, foamy, and not very Japanese cauliflower chawanmushi accented with Meyer lemon, and dry aged duck, likely to become a restaurant staple throughout America in 2014. The meat had been hung to tenderize and intensify for 12 days, and it came with preserved persimmons, which is indeed Japanese. One hurried meal during opening days doesn’t quite elevate a restaurant to superstardom, but I left convinced that Avance was already one of the most impressive new restaurants of the year.

When in Paris, Americans like to eat where the French eat, where the language is a beautiful babble that makes you realize that the journey, however long and uncomfortable, was worth the stress. Save the cost of that plane ticket.

Greenwich is just up the road—or tracks—from Manhattan, about an hour away. The journey is painless and the language I least heard at Le Penguin was English. Every French ex-pat living in the surrounding area, which includes chunks of New York and Connecticut, is hanging out at this undersized, overcrowded bistro with longtime restaurateur Antoine Blech running the dining room. When I demanded to know if Le Penguin had pilfered its rillettes of salmon from Le Bernardin, the three-star Michelin seafood restaurant, he said Le Penguin had improved the recipe by adding lemon rind but hadn’t matched the texture of Le Bernardin’s.

Everything at Le Penguin feels French, starting with the tiny stand-up bar at the back of the room and extending to the butcher paper tablecloths (stamped with little penguins). The food is mostly classic bistro, but it seems livelier, re-energized. The salty frites are crunchy, perfectly Frenchified, and the garlicky escargots have flair—they’re gathered together in a little bowl and topped with puffs of pastry. Your dessert should be a floating island—balls of soft meringue adrift in crème anglaise—because it’s there, and some day nobody will make this anymore. French bistros are at their best when they’re mom and pop, and Le Penguin feels even more agreeable when Suzanne Blech, the mom, shows up on busy nights to help out.

Casa Luca is a subtly sophisticated, exceptionally appealing restaurant with white-tile walls, comfy seating, fifties music, and black-and-white photos. Fabio Trabocchi, the chef and owner, calls it a casual Italian spot, but I thought it was spiffier than that, and I liked the food best when I didn’t think of it as Italian.

It’s not a place that sticks to Antipasti. Primo. Secundo. Casa Luca has many more categories—about eight or nine, by my figuring. For sure, all manner of antipasti are available, but after that the menu expands wildly, concluding with Family Style Favorites, which are the extra-jumbo dishes. I began Italian, with melting, mesmerizing prosciutto from the Mangalista pig, to me the best of the heritage porkers scampering around barnyards these days. The main courses are the highlights here, and more oversized than Italian ever gets.

The branzino was a monstrous filet, oven-roasted and crispy on top, accompanied by vegetables so succulent they were surely in the oven a lot longer than the fish. The dish of the night was a lamb shoulder rack—I never knew shoulder could be a rack. This was stunningly savory, marinated and slow-roasted, which meant it came to the table medium-rare and crisp, herbaceous and succulent, a stellar example of what rosemary, bay leaf, garlic and a talented chef can do. I never pass up affogato, traditionally espresso poured over vanilla gelato. Here it’s a variation on a sundae, chocolate sauce and mocha liqueur poured over the top. Who needs genuine Italian when you can have that?

Commonplace brunch is brutal, all those eggs cooked so many unfortunate ways. Daikaya’s is brilliant: Japanese-Jewish fusion—smoked salmon with rice balls. Filipino-Japanese fusion—braised pork hash with citrus-yuzu and an egg. Polish-Japanese fusion—stuffed cabbage with shiso. Harlem-Japanese fusion—fried chicken and waffles stuffed with red-bean paste. French-Japanese-Chesapeake Bay fusion—poached eggs on a thin muffin with croquettes plus a sprinkling of Old Bay and—this one never ends—Japanese-style Worcestershire sauce.

Washington D.C. has always boasted an abundance of international restaurants that offer what we used to call “foreign food,” but this is something else. It’s absolutely unfamiliar food, the most extraordinary I’ve seen, certainly this early in the day.

Chef Katsuya Fukushima serves his Sunday brunch on the second floor of a multi-level Japanese restaurant usually offering ramen below and izakaya above. He formerly worked for the Spanish chef José Andrés, a man of infinite inspirations, but Andrés never cooked this way. What’s not to miss? The French toast, thick and mesmerizingly sweet, made with brioche soaked overnight in cream and soy milk, caramelized in the cooking, and somehow ending up tasting like the greatest flan ever made. You should have it as dessert. Better yet, have it twice, at the beginning of your brunch and again at the end.

How can you not love a place like this? It’s barely a restaurant. I’m surprised Alma is even permitted to call itself one. If you’re coming by car, you’ll probably drive right by. There’s no visible sign, so look for Club Las Palmas next door, offering billiards and hostesses, which at one time in America was all a man needed to find happiness.

Alma, once an ever-transient pop-up from chef Ari Taymor, is now settled permanently into a mostly abandoned building. The exterior appears to be made out of the same planks used to board up businesses at the approach of hurricanes. Inside, you’ll find everything a $5,000 renovation budget gets you: hanging bulbs, formica tables, benches, and molded plastic cantilever chairs. Alma appears to be trending upward, though. Now there’s a wine list, and it’s not cheap.

Taymor, a young chef with all the courage in the world and considerable talent to back it up, serves an idiosyncratic tasting menu, the kind that will both puzzle and thrill you. He’s particularly adept with salads and vegetables, my favorite consisting of compressed beets and apples, crushed hazelnuts and malted crème fraîche. There’s an egg yolk with smoked dates and intensely reduced sunchoke soup. He prepares sturgeon gorgeously, which isn’t easy, and the dominant herb is startling —pine tips. While his white-and-dark meat pressed chicken concoction reminded me a little too much of a Klondike bar, it exhibited a swell fancy touch. I don’t believe I’ve previously come upon such polished cooking in a restaurant where the customer bathroom and the staff locker room shared the same space.

There are only two kinds of barbecue joints. One has been around forever and each time you visit you’re praying the pitmaster hasn’t retired and the meat gone all to hell. The other kind has just opened and you know in your heart it’s not as good as the old kind, even though everyone is talking about it. La Barbecue is the exception, new and as thrilling as Cowtown Rodeo.

It isn’t pretty, that’s for sure. It subscribes to the new school of barbecue aesthetic, which means it’s almost a dump. You enter a compound with a dirt floor and chain-link fencing, pick up your food at a trailer, sit at a picnic table under what could be a second-hand revival tent, and hope the clouds overhead don’t spit cold rain on your ribs. All that’s missing is a junkyard dog. The barbeque is some of the best ever, as good as barbecue gets, maybe better if you’re talking brisket and beef sausage, the foundations of Texas barbecue.

That sausage, much like a knoblewurst and probably German in origin, is smoky, coarse, chewy, spicy and meaty, so good I nearly skipped the brisket, I was so full. That would have been heartbreaking. The brisket is so exquisite you can ask for it lean, usually a mistake, and it will come out soft and savory, not even close to dry. Get a slice on the fatty side and you’ll be asking yourself if this might be the greatest beef you ever ate.

You probably didn't know that pristine, washed-by-the-rains Seattle had a neighborhood like this: a little decadent, a little ancient, a little seedy, a couple of square blocks that might well be New Orleans transplanted to the Northwest. The reclamation is under way, and no part of it is more appealing than Bar Sajor, from chef Matt Dillon. It's one of the most unusual restaurants of the year, a casual place that feels ultra-elite.

The space is brightly lit, the room soaring, the ornamental touches so lovely I can't imagine a nicer spot for a first date. (Well, the boxy aerie reminds me of the seating area where wives and daughters are stashed during services in Orthodox synagogues.) At Bar Sajor, even the exposed pipes look good. The restaurant has two open kitchens, so welcoming that you might wonder if you're supposed to wander over and join the cooks. One is for cold food and the other for wood-grilling and wood-roasting.

Once you're seated, you'll be presented with hot tea in a Moroccan glass, one of the oddball but endearing eccentricities of the place. The banquettes are blue-striped, the wainscoting on the walls pure white, a little South of France. High overhead are shelves holding huge fermenting jars reached by a secret hatch in the wall behind them. The food emphasizes finesse and exquisite colors. You know that octopus can be soft and mild, as it is here, but you probably never thought of those not-so-lovely suckers as artistic. They're arranged like flower petals around the boundary of the plate. Chicken-liver mousse isn't just brown anymore, not when it's topped with thin strips of yellow squash and crisp sage leaves, and you'll no longer think of pork rillettes as ponderous after tasting this variation on a predictable dish. The specialty of the house is hard cider—among the choices you'll find gentle, sweet, and refreshing Montreuil from Normandy and dark, dry, and exotic Isastegi from Basque Country. The heavy, crunchy bread might be the lustiest food in the place, and the caramelized-butter ice cream is a masterpiece. I understand that everybody wants salted caramel these days, but try this and your passion might change.

Margaret Gradé and Daniel DeLong were once famous, if only locally. They operated Manka's, an early-twentieth-century hunting lodge and restaurant that would have endured forever had it not burned down in 2006. Now they have Sir and Star, located in a once-shuttered inn, The Olema, located at the very end of a winding road about thirty-five miles from San Francisco and on the very edge of the Point Reyes National Seashore. Gradé looks like Joni Mitchell and talks like Annie Hall. I have no idea what DeLong looks like, since he didn't emerge from the kitchen the night a friend and I ate there. He cooks beautifully, in an old-time, happy-to-have-you-in-my-house sort of way.

I didn't know what to expect from the food, but it's the kind that's no longer commonplace—rich, generous, soothing, and in quantities large enough to fill your plate. The dining room is very plain, almost Shaker-like, although I don't believe Shakers settled out here—to my knowledge, they don't surf. I thought I'd have problems with the wine list, since it has only local wines from Marin County (plus champagne), but I found a 1999 Kalin Cellars Cuvée DD Pinot Noir, which had mature scents of berries and tobacco. The food is remarkably priced: Appetizers go for $10 to $12, main courses for $20, and sides for $5. My friend and I ordered the “O yes,” a tasting menu, and asked if our dishes could differ. Most restaurants refuse such a request, but not this one.

The Sablefish from Surrounding Seas—after a while you won't mind the cutesy menu alliterations—featured soft and sweet sablefish that seemed slightly smoked, bringing back delicatessen memories, although the smokiness turned out to be from an oyster sauce. Dungeness crab came with hollandaise, the real thing, so concentrated and intense I knew that eating it was a sin. Pair it with the 2008 Skywalker Chardonnay. A pork rib was much too fatty and luscious—in other words, just right—and on the same plate was a bit of pork jowl that made pork belly taste like spa food. As we left, Gradé handed each of us a little bag of caramel corn for the drive home. We could barely eat it, but of course we did.

Paul Kahan's food has always been more interesting than everyone else's, and just a little bit unusual, too. At Nico, he's done something out of character. The Italian menu he's conceived is familiar, what we crave. It's also faultless. He's opened the kind of restaurant we all hope to find in the heart of downtown, wherever we travel. You leave your hotel and there it is, precisely what you're in the mood to eat, not just at dinner but also at breakfast and lunch. Nico is open almost all the time.

The raw-fish preparations—crudo on the menu—are simpler than most, the seafood standing out. They combine something raw, something fruity, something crunchy, and (usually but not always) something spicy, just enough for heat to linger on the tongue. For me, escolar with avocado, blood orange, and capers is the irresistible crudo combination. The homemade pastas taste buttery. Try the fresh tagliolini with tiny clams. There are a few more ingredients than you'd find in Italy—leeks, tomato bits, and chiles—but not so many that the essential simplicity is lost. The seafood-and-chickpea minestrone with shrimp, squid, and clams was more like a stew than a soup, overstuffed with fish, and a not-to-be-missed dessert was the Nico Torte, a little like eating transcendent coffee cake at the end of the day. fflAt lunch, look for the porchetta sandwich. Pair it with the irregularly shaped, impeccably crunchy fingerling fries. Everyone is after breakthroughs in fried potatoes, and this is one. At breakfast, you should gear up for tripe and eggs, but if it's too early to stomach that, you'll have a wonderful time with the pastries, in particular kouign-amann, a crusty little caramelized cake, best topped with their ricotta-based cream. Nico might be Kahan going conventional, but the food doesn't taste that way.

It's said that fine dining is doomed, that it's too pretentious, too expensive, and too weighed down by tradition. Fewer and fewer diners care about elite eccentricities such as starched tablecloths that are re-ironed before service begins or parchment-thin wineglasses. Dover, rather ordinary in appearance, is the future of fine dining. It offers nothing in the way of froufrou but dazzles with an array of the luxurious food we love: oysters, lobster, and duck, as well as a truffled chicken entrée for two that comes in two courses, a preparation that's become a benchmark of haute cuisine.

This is the second establishment of chefs Joseph Ogrodnek and Walker Stern, unrelated to each other but as inescapably twinned as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. In 2011, Ogrodnek and Stern opened the wildly successful Battersby, and now they've moved up in culinary ambition. It wasn't that difficult. They once worked together at Alain Ducasse at The Essex House. Dover seats fifty-four, which is palatial by Brooklyn standards, but the furnishings are extraordinarily plain, the clientele is anything but well-dressed, much of the construction work was done by the chefs themselves, and you will almost certainly encounter a line when you visit the single restroom. (If you haven't read any food critics before your visit, fellow diners in line are an excellent source of culinary opinion.)

The chicken is not to be missed, but I also appreciated such retro classics as Caviar Pie, where blini are topped with American paddlefish caviar; cod grenobloise, essentially seafood in brown-butter sauce with capers; and warm oysters with sauce Choron, a béarnaise uplifted with tomato. You're not quite at Le Bernardin or Daniel when you dine here, not when you're seated at a table for two about twenty-two inches across, but Dover is not far removed. Let me convince you: The chicken for two opens with dark meat that resembles chicken salad but belongs to an alternative, truffled universe. Then comes the breast, formally presented tableside in a black Staub pan, then plated soft and silky, accompanied by grilled radicchio and a truffled gratin. That should get your interest. Maybe Michelin's, too.

Orsa & Winston is a far-ranging restaurant that doesn't appear at first glance to be one, or maybe that's just what I've come to expect of small restaurants in downtown L.A. Here you will find not just small plates, the local standard, but almost every style of plating that larger restaurants have on hand. There's a pastry chef on premises, a real luxury these days. The wonderfully versatile Josef Centeno, who also operates the sensational Bäco Mercat, offers whatever you might wish—a five-course menu, a nine-course menu, an omakase menu (that word has jumped the language barrier), and what is today the rarest of all dining options, genuine bigness in his family-style meal. Orsa & Winston (named for his dogs) lacks nothing but enough space for everyone who wishes to dine there. It seats fewer than forty.

The tasting menu includes variations on the big four of small-plate dining—raw fish, fresh fruit, exotic sauces, and vivid greens. One such plate had kanpachi, grapefruit, yuzu kosho, and celery leaves. (Celery leaves are the farmers'-market garnish of the year, in drinks as well as in food.) Centeno's carne cruda is dry-aged, with Pecorino and truffled beef marrow. The Breakfast in a Shell is a coddled egg with sherry-spiked whipped cream, pancetta, maple syrup, chives, and rice, a so-called breakfast item more sweet than savory and more delicious than you can imagine. Centeno has sourced rice grown in Uruguay by a Japanese farmer for his elegant risotto with uni, geoduck, Pecorino-Romano cream, and micro shiso.

He understands how to play with flavors, textures, and contrasts, resulting in masterfully complicated comfort food. Imagine squid-ink spaghettini with Dungeness crab, uni butter, and charred kumquats, a shocking combination, unexpectedly right. The pastry is special, too, especially the blood-orange sorbet, cream, meringue, and basil, a miniature Pavlova; and the beyond-comprehension pear crostata with huckleberries, butterscotch-rosemary ice cream, and brown-butter crumble. Need more of an inducement to get in your car and drive there? In downtown L.A., one of the great re-emerging neighborhoods in this country, off-street parking still goes for about five bucks.

They Come Bearing Food, One Cook After Another. Nobody Can Resist So Much Charm.

Gunshow has pulled off the improbable: It manages to be the most intimate restaurant in America without candles, flowers, or post-dinner petits fours. In fact, you've hardly ever come upon such stark simplicity—the floor is cement, and you sit at long, bare wooden communal tables held together with vise grips, hardly an ambience to suggest romance. You'll feel remarkably close to the cooks, who take the concept of food presentation to a new level of familiarity.

Gunshow is the latest in prep-kitchen chic, started a while ago at Brooklyn Fare. You don't order from the menu, although you are given one. Instead, an array of cooks come out to you, one by one, bearing trays of the food they've prepared. They're pretty much the head chefs of their own mini-kitchens. They bend over or go to their knees, offering small plates you can accept or decline. The problem is that you'll find the cooks so engaging and their food so diverse and tempting, you're likely to say yes to everything.

Nothing is scattershot, if you don't mind the pun. If it's meat you want, you might have the option of selecting from grilled lamb merguez with orange harissa, butternut-squash chimichurri, and brown-butter couscous; lamb vindaloo with raita; pork schnitzel with charred broccoli; beef tartare scented with anchovies and accompanied by grilled lettuce and Caesar dressing; or deep-fried quail with smoked-bourbon jus over tiny peas. I don't recall so many styles of cooking from one restaurant kitchen, and each dish is successful, because every cook specializes in the cuisine he or she knows best. You might think you're at a church supper where everyone in the parish goes to culinary school. I had to resist the urge to accept every dish that came my way. If I'd done that, I'd have been stuffed in thirty minutes. It's not just the cooks who try to benevolently impose their will. Our waitress noticed me pondering two wines and asked if I would please pick the Côte-Rôtie because she hadn't had it before. I wanted to ask her to sit down and join us for dinner, and I'm not certain she would have refused.

Pork. Oysters. Grits. Bourbon. All the Best of Sourthern Cooking, Elevated to a New Level.

Husk in Nashville brilliantly achieves Sean Brock's goal, to modernize and perfect southern food. Although the first Husk, in Charleston, and this second Husk are alike in appearance, situated in historic buildings with lengthy porches, and have many menu similarities, it's the Nashville Husk that's the more impressive.

I never thought Brock found the greatness he was after at the first Husk—although others did. He sure found it here. The food expresses the wonderful softness, sensuality, and homeyness of traditional southern cooking and adds to that the vividness that comes from well-sourced products allowed to express their superiority. Brock's quail stuffed with a crumbled pork-and-rice mixture, sitting in a quail jus smoky from sausage drippings and enriched by the yolk of an egg, might be the best southern dish I've ever been served.

An entrée of southern vegetables—heritage vegetables are at the heart of his cooking—included grits in a cup with strips of red pepper and a poached egg on top, as well as fresh corn cooked on embers, dressed with basil and lime, and enriched with sheep's-milk cheese. A marrow bone came in a miniature cast-iron pan, accompanied by sweet onion relish and biscuits, a quirky combination I wouldn't have admired with any biscuits less flaky and fluffy than these. Warm oysters on the half shell with a butter sauce of green garlic, lovage, and preserved lemon could be repositioned as the escargots of the South. I'm just a northerner, but it strikes me that Husk in Nashville has found the pathway to better southern cooking, transforming it with an abundance of finesse.

Where There's Smoke, There's Grilling, as All-American as a Slab of Swordfish

You've certainly dined in a multitude of restaurants that positioned themselves as “modern American grills.” Like me, you might have ceased caring what this was ever supposed to mean. I walked into King + Duke with a friend and immediately found it attractive. Even so, I didn't expect much to come of our casual dinner. King + Duke didn't appear fundamentally different from other places that cook over wood. It was. In the middle of the meal, I sat up straight and thought, This is the one. This is informal American dining, perfected.

King + Duke—named after characters in Huckleberry Finn—has an endless bar, an open kitchen that seems to stretch as far as a football field, and a huge outdoor patio set up for eating in warm weather. There are comfy banquettes, padded chairs, hardwood floors, and charmingly attentive servers. When aren't they that way in the South? The modern American food comforts with southern touches and startles with English ones. Restaurants today love to charge for bread. Here each guest receives a complimentary Yorkshire pudding.

Slow-roasted lamb belly rose to prominence this year, but this tender, luscious candied preparation dazzled above all others. Duck breast boasts the beefiness of steak. Swordfish from Block Island—I often think of grilled swordfish as the signature American fish—is cut so thick it develops a crust during grilling. Mine came with corn, field peas, and black-eyed peas. The desserts tend to be rich beyond comprehension. Go for the pulverizingly perfect sticky toffee pudding, another English beauty.

I should have figured out that something special awaited me back when I was walking through the plaza on Peachtree Road on my way to the restaurant and ran into a delightful wall of wood smoke. Usually that means that barbecue lies dead ahead, but King + Duke does something far more memorable. Grilling over wood reminds us of the backyard cookouts and family camping trips so essential to our lives, allows food to speak with an American accent.

The Little Italy-Style Joint You Dreamed of Discovering, Right Down to the Veal Parm

Once, Italian-American (or Bronx-Italian) food was something special, but it seemed to be on the threshold of extinction until Carbone came to the rescue. Italian-American was the signature food of America throughout most of the twentieth century, with its oversize meatballs, overstuffed pastas, and oversauced cutlets, one more extravagantly satisfying than the next. It was the American interpretation of how Italians ate, and it helped define our culture. When Michael Corleone shot and killed a corrupt Irish-American cop in The Godfather, he did it in an Italian-American restaurant in the Bronx.

Carbone might be the best Italian-American restaurant of all time; it's almost certainly the most expensive and probably the most sophisticated, even if it has wacky nostalgic touches here and there. The waiters are in crimson tudos and speak in a Bronx patois (“Ya know,” “Ya got it”). The soundtrack features glorious Italianate songs, such as Julius La Rosa's 1953 “Eh, Cumpari.”It's all guaranteed to make you smile. Of greater importance, co-chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi have re-invigorated Italian-American cuisine, which has a reputation for being ridiculously heavy—because it usually is ridiculously heavy. It isn't that way here, except in the case of the whopping veal parmigiana, so huge it could double as an anchor should you wish an enemy to sleep with the fishes.

Mostly the food is extraordinarily and unexpectedly restrained, as with tortellini in ragù, the pasta rings stuffed with sheep's-milk ricotta and sitting atop a creamy, pale red sauce made with beef, veal, pork, and lardo. The gently pan-crisped halibut is totally modern, presented with a scattering of vegetables, fragile squash blossoms among them. (Usually squash blossoms are stuffed with cheese and possess the heft of bocce balls.) Every cook working in every Little Italy in every American city should be required to eat here.

Roe stands out, quietly. It's the understated restaurant of the year: modest, lovely, detail-oriented, rather shy. You come in, take your seat, and prepare yourself for little more than very good wine and exquisite food. No dramatics here. Not many restaurants in Portland are blessed with such restraint.

The two of us sat at the bar, where the lengthier of two tasting menus is offered—seven courses, mostly seafood, quite Japanese, for $95, one of the best bargains you're going to find. Before us was a low dark-wood barrier that separated us from the three cooks behind the counter. They were working furiously, totally engrossed, never looking up, never saying a word to us and not many to one another.

We made no new friends, but that didn't stop us from loving the food. The combinations are exquisitely ecuted: arctic-char roe in a watercress emulsion, the crunch of tobiko over shaved foie gras. At the start, the courses flowed into one another, in tune, seamless. Then came contrasts, one of them mostly French, sea bass in a sauce grenobloise, the comeback French preparation of the year.

One dessert was a pan-roasted Seckel pear with salted praline-caramel popcorn and crème anglaise. The wines for the night are presented on the menu, selected to match the food, but should you wish something special, you need only ask. Roe is located in the rear of a larger restaurant called Block + Tackle, but it's totally sealed off, the door the sort you find in genetic-engineering laboratories, constructed so that no molecule in one room can escape to the other.

This being Portland, the room has exposed pipes across the ceiling, but all else is uncharacteristically restrained. The walls are very Japanese, a hand-painted cherry-blossom tree depicted on one, a serene paneled ink drawing hanging on the other. Don't worry about being in the presence of so much tranquillity. Perfection is so rare it has an excitement all its own.

They stand outside, mingling, talking, waiting for the door to open, for their moment to come. If you don't know what to expect from Ludo Lefebvre's Trois Mec, and I had no idea, you might think you're in the wrong place—the sign overhead reads Raffallo's Pizza & Italian Foods. The joint could well be an underground Italian social club, guys hanging around, hands in pockets, hoping to get inside. Okay, girls, too.

Trois Mec is the toughest ticket in a town where a lot of places are that way. It seems like a pop-up, which Lefebvre knows how to do better than anybody else, but inside, the place promises permanence. There's marble everywhere, even underfoot, plus new ovens, a new grill, all the trimmings. (That old-time pizza sign is considered too wonderful to replace.) Lefebvre does a tasting menu, little plates that incorporate a lot of French touches, somewhat suggestive of those found in the neo-bistros that have swept Paris in recent years, starry food served in less-than-sterling settings. There's classic technique here, which is that French thing, understandable inasmuch as Lefebvre comes from just outside Chablis.

Nothing you will eat tastes conventional: The “snacks,” which would be called amuse-bouches in a fancier place, are shockingly intense, a wake-up for the meal ahead. The buckwheat popcorn with rice-vinegar powder quickly got my attention, convincing me that the struggle to get in was worth the effort. Later dishes are more delicate—tweezers and squeeze bottles are in sight—but there's also that grill, where you'll watch cabbage go up in flames for a dish that includes bone-marrow flan, cured egg, and smoked-almond-milk crème anglaise. His version of raw beef layered with caramelized eggplant and smoky yogurt is really just an extreme play on beef tartare. The end of the meal heralds the arrival of remarkable petits fours, the magic one a mini éclair with hazelnut buttercream and candied chestnut. If you can't get in—and few succeed—be patient. Lefebvre is planning a simpler French spot in the abandoned Tasty Thai restaurant next door.

On the long-overlooked east side of Austin stands the most fascinating new restaurant in America. Thanks to Paul Qui and other local chefs, what used to be the toughest part of town is now the tastiest. Qui's high-end restaurant could be mistaken for a sushi bar but isn't one—you'll realize it's more than that when you see the vast, gleaming open kitchen where he prepares food displaying an array of Asian and Texan influences. Most unusual and daring are dishes from the Philippines, where Qui was born. These include dinuguan, a pork-blood stew containing mushrooms, meat, and potato gnocchi. The pork blood didn't shock me, but the gnocchi did—do they really make pillowy pasta in the Philippines? His Ode to Michel Bras pays homage to the famous foraging French chef and is one of the best vegetable dishes of the year, a compilation of fresh and pickled products such as cucumbers, radishes, black-fennel fronds, wood sorrel, roasted garlic, and onion jam, all suspended in a cool turnip-dashi puree. (The shocking price: $9.)

Qui's talent is prodigious, and his food is filled with both subtle shadings and sheer sensationalism. You might be offered a preserved green peach or the belly of a sea bream. Local tastes are well represented, too. Texas-bred Wagyu rib eye and dry-aged côte de boeuf. There's also beef tartare, which wanders far from cattle country—it's spiced with kimchi. The dining area, as well as the freestanding building, is reminiscent of the two Austin sushi spots that made Qui famous, Uchi and Uchiko. Qui has blond-wood slats inside and out, which is very Japanese, and white stucco outside, which is very Southwest.

A blazingly original cross-cultural dish is his taco of sea eel, scrambled eggs, trout roe, and kale. The same goes for his uplifted version of halo-halo, the Philippine iced drink—this one is stuffed with pumpkin custard, rice pudding, candied pecans, and passion fruit. You're unlikely to have eaten a taco anything like this one or sipped a halo-halo quite so upscale. If Paul Qui isn't the most fearless chef in America, he's surely the most confident.

Photo: Bonjwing Lee

Photo: Daniel Krieger/Courtesy of Ivan Raman Slurp Shop

Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop's Shoyu and Shio ramens.

24. Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop

New York, NY

Tokyo-Grade Noodles Reach Ramen-Ready New York

Years ago, while writing a profile of David Chang, I learned everything I needed to know about ramen, which is Japanese noodle soup. First he told me it required years of research and untold slurping before a man could understand the complexities. Then he said none of that mattered because everyone “is going to like the ramen they grew up with.”

I’ve been eating chicken noodle soup all of my life, which might be why I’m so taken with Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop—the basis of the broth is chicken, not pork. This is the first American outpost of the emerging Ivan Orkin mini-ramen empire, heretofore found only in Japan. The shop is located in the Gotham West Market, an overachieving food court that one of my friends claims has the best food in Times Square. It almost does, except it’s not really in Times Square, and you have to walk almost a mile from 42nd and Broadway to get there.

The two styles referred to on the menu as “classics” are the Shoyu, which means the broth is seasoned with soy, and the Shio, where the seasoning is Japanese sea salt. If you’re a broth person, order the Shoyu—the soy adds a dimension so rich and disturbingly delicious you might think you’ll never need pork fat again. If you’re a noodle person, have the Shio—the custom-made noodles show off their rye flavor better coming out of the lighter broth. Both versions came with shredded scallions and a soft, mild, chunk of pork.

Just as comforting as the ramen is the whitefish rice bowl, also quite New York. The cold smoked whitefish (a New York staple) combined with the warm, sweetly seasoned rice tasted like freeform sushi, and an extra jolt of pleasure came from the juicy, marinated salmon roe on top. The Ivan Ramen chain has come to the city where it belongs.

Photo: Sarah Jurado/Courtesy of Westward

Westward's fish stew.

23. Westward

Seattle, WA

A Twisty Drive to a Hidden Treasure

I loved the difficulty of driving to a restaurant that’s within the Seattle city limits but requires all the twists, turns and maneuvers you’d experience finding your way to a trattoria in the hills of Liguria. I wasn’t so thrilled with the parking opportunities—there’s allegedly a lot, but I couldn’t locate it, so I left my car alongside the road and was happy not to have a ticket when I came out. (Maybe the cops can’t find the place either.)

Westward is worth the trip for the sheer fun of getting there, and for the view of Lake Union, right outside the door. That will get even better when the weather warms up and you can eat on the huge lakeside patio, seated on an Adirondack chair. The restaurant is entirely casual, inside and out, and offers dishes from all over the world, everything from smoked Manila clam dip to grilled halloumi cheese to Moroccan fish stew. In truth, it’s a little more diversity than the modest kitchen is able to handle. Some of the items are made in a wood-burning oven, which is terrific, and all of them make for pleasant nibbling in the company of friends. The oysters are wonderful, this being the west coast, and I could spend an afternoon eating those Hama Hamas and drinking the Vinho Verde, which went for $24 a bottle.

On the way out, the general manager thanked me for getting lost and calling him for help. He said he had rehearsed exhaustively so he could assist customers, but I was the first to actually get lost—everyone else had GPS.

Photo: Morgan Ione Photography/Courtesy of Row 34

A collection of sides at Row 34.

22. Row 34

Boston, MA

For the Epicure Lurking Inside Every Working Man

There’s a mystery to a perfect glass of beer on tap, although you might think there’s nothing to it: Pull the handle, then let go.

I’ve only been interested in beer for about a half-dozen years, so I can’t claim to understand why some beer tastes so much better than the same beer somewhere else. It sure does at Row 34, which calls itself a “workingman’s oyster bar,” even if the room is too shiny and polished to be a hangout for working stiffs, no disrespect to them.

I sat at the counter, ordered oysters and beer, and immediately thought about canceling my other dining reservations for the weekend. You don’t have to eat only oysters. I liked the warm lobster roll, the potted smoked trout, and especially the mashed potatoes with sour cream (exactly the way my father, who was not really a workingman, used to prefer his potatoes). But I kept going back for the same thing, the oysters. I particularly admired the sweet and nutty variety named Row 34. They’re grown in nearby Duury and are exclusive to this restaurant and another owned by the partners. The best bargain was the Howlands Landing oyster, only $2 apiece. There’s a couple dozen beers on tap, all of them pristine and served in pint glasses, tulip glasses, and snifters. I felt like I was in a farm-to-table restaurant, except here, tap-to-table reigns.

Photo: Maria Alexandra Vettese/alittlemorelikethis.com

Sweedeedee's baked goods.

21. Sweedeedee

Portland, OR

Something Special Between Two Slices of Bread

Let me say this before I say anything else: You’ll suffer, but for a good cause. Friends going to Sweedeedee told me we’d have to wait, and I told them I didn’t want to wait. I don’t like brunch very much, so why wait around for something you aren’t going to enjoy?

They insisted, dragged me to somewhere in Portland I hadn’t been, and I thought I’d been everywhere. Sweedeedee is a plain little shop with a slamming screen door. When we got there, dozens of people who didn’t know what to do with themselves were doing just that, nothing. I felt like I was in Grand Central Terminal on a day when the trains had stopped running. After an hour, we were led to a table. I ordered the braised beef on grilled brioche with horseradish cream. It sounded good, but I figured nothing could be good enough to justify that wait. It turned out to be the best non-delicatessen sandwich of my life, and I’d put it up against pastrami in a fair fight. The meat, horseradish cream, and bread didn’t simply melt in my mouth. It seemed to sublimate, going from solid to gone in seconds. I don’t remember chewing. I don’t remember breathing. It was like inhaling culinary nitrous oxide. A friend had the egg sandwich. Not much, right? Wrong. The bread, cornmeal molasses, would make Robert E. Lee throw down his sword and surrender.

I couldn’t decide whether Sweedeedee was a great bakery that happened to make superb sandwiches or a supernatural sandwich shop with unbelievable bread. The salted honey pie answered that question. It had a plain, everyday crust, but every crumb tasted like manna. I will forever be grateful to owner Eloise Augustyn for allowing me and my friends to stand around and be miserable so we could all become joyful beyond compare.

Photo: Kelly Campbell/Courtesy of Chi Spacca

Chi Spacca's beef and bone marrow pie.

20. Chi Spacca

Los Angeles, CA

A Very Meaty Chunk of Italy in L.A.

When the time comes to have that fabled Last Meal, keep Chi Spacca in mind. I find it hard to believe I walked in, unwary, and walked out, alive.

It looks so innocent—a tiny spot between Osteria Mozza and Mozza2Go once used for occasional family-style dinners, now a restaurant all its own. Chi Spacca is part of L.A.’s tiniest food complex, three side-by-side-by-side shops I think of as Mozza on Melrose, all under the guidance of Nancy Silverton. Where Chi Spacca is concerned, it’s probably more accurate to call her the trail boss. There’s meat here, heaps of it, served in primitive portions by chef Chad Colby, who apparently likes people to eat suicidally. Even when you think a dish might be light, like the focaccia, you end up with Focaccia di Recco, which is made with soft stracchino and turns out to be less like bread and more like a whole cheese pizza.

Everything is beyond normal. The Tomahawk pork chop, all 42 ounces including the best rib bones ever conceived, could have fed our entire table and might have, had I not hogged the bones. The beef and bone marrow pie has an unexpectedly flaky crust, a herd of braised beef, and a marrow bone the size of a smokestack sticking out. It comes with a barrel’s worth of mashed potatoes, or maybe I was hallucinating by then. You can’t escape the onslaught by ordering calamari—it’s supposedly dipped in delicate rice-flour batter, but it arrived Chinese-restaurant style, which means the coating was extra heavy, extra thick. Don’t get me wrong. I love Chi Spacca, even though a better name would have been Avanzi, which means “leftovers.”

Photo: Andrew Thomas Lee/Courtesy of The General Muir

The General Muir's "Maven" platter with salmon salad and house-cured lox.

19. The General Muir

Atlanta, GA

**A Real-Deal New York Delicatessen in Atlanta—and We'd Like it Back, **Please

Why isn’t this delicatessen in New York? It belongs in Brooklyn, or the Lower East Side. Well, maybe the Brooklyn or the LES of a half-century ago. Just to be clear, this is an authentic delicatessen, not a deli—one of those shops that slaps together honey ham on a stale roll with a bag of chips. In the evenings, the menu is much like that of any modern, informal restaurant, but at breakfast and lunch, this is an old-school delicatessen, with one exception: The waiters aren’t crusty coots who can’t wait to tell you what’s wrong with their lives. They’re sweet young kids, often blonde and always polite. Somehow, I wasn’t disappointed.

Cel-Ray soda, a New York staple, is available. Instead I began lunch with housemade cucumber-lime soda, the best utilization of a cucumber I’ve come across except when it’s being transformed into a sour pickle. The matzoh ball in the chicken soup is light and fluffy, and the pastrami—nothing is more important than pastrami—is soft, peppery, satisfying, and comes on the rarest of breads, genuine seeded Jewish rye. (Should you be longing for pastrami and find yourself nowhere near Atlanta, here’s a tip: Try the pastrami at Dillman’s in Chicago, another new place.)

If you’re having breakfast at The General Muir, you’ll be pleased to know that the trout is smoked and the lox is cured on premesis. The Nova isn’t, but it was so sterling, blackened around the edges, that I had to admire the restaurant’s sourcing skills. The General Muir has all the dishes that at one time made delicatessens the most wonderful restaurants on earth. At least I always felt that way.

Photo: Steve Legato/Courtesy of Avance

Avance's cauliflower chowanmushi.

18. Avance

Philadelphia, PA

Very New-Style Cuisine in a Very Old-Style City

Finally, the sainted Le Bec-Fin space has found what it was looking for, a successor worthy of former chef Georges Perrier. A friend and I managed a quick meal at Avance at the very end of 2013, days after it opened for business under the chef and owner, Justin Bogle, formerly at Gilt in New York. He was ecutive chef there for three years and maintained its Michelin two-star status throughout. The food at Avance was so impressive we wish we could have stayed longer and eaten far more.

The old Le Bec-Fin was an expression of old-world sensibility, gilded and ornate. The new Avance looks Nordic from the outside, terribly serious and monotonal on the inside, with blue and grey walls, grey carpeting, grey banquettes, Edison bulbs screwed into overhead sockets, and a vertical arbor of unexuberant plants. Even the handles of the Laguiole knives are color-coordinated, a perfect matching grey.

I got lucky with the wine list, never easy in Philly, found a eight-year old Meursault for under $80. Bogle’s cooking was absolutely assured, even in those first days on the job. We tried warm, foamy, and not very Japanese cauliflower chawanmushi accented with Meyer lemon, and dry aged duck, likely to become a restaurant staple throughout America in 2014. The meat had been hung to tenderize and intensify for 12 days, and it came with preserved persimmons, which is indeed Japanese. One hurried meal during opening days doesn’t quite elevate a restaurant to superstardom, but I left convinced that Avance was already one of the most impressive new restaurants of the year.

Photo: Antoine Blech/Courtesy of Le Penguin

17. Le Penguin

Greenwich, CT

Your Perfect Parisian Bistro in Connecticut

When in Paris, Americans like to eat where the French eat, where the language is a beautiful babble that makes you realize that the journey, however long and uncomfortable, was worth the stress. Save the cost of that plane ticket.

Greenwich is just up the road—or tracks—from Manhattan, about an hour away. The journey is painless and the language I least heard at Le Penguin was English. Every French ex-pat living in the surrounding area, which includes chunks of New York and Connecticut, is hanging out at this undersized, overcrowded bistro with longtime restaurateur Antoine Blech running the dining room. When I demanded to know if Le Penguin had pilfered its rillettes of salmon from Le Bernardin, the three-star Michelin seafood restaurant, he said Le Penguin had improved the recipe by adding lemon rind but hadn’t matched the texture of Le Bernardin’s.

Everything at Le Penguin feels French, starting with the tiny stand-up bar at the back of the room and extending to the butcher paper tablecloths (stamped with little penguins). The food is mostly classic bistro, but it seems livelier, re-energized. The salty frites are crunchy, perfectly Frenchified, and the garlicky escargots have flair—they’re gathered together in a little bowl and topped with puffs of pastry. Your dessert should be a floating island—balls of soft meringue adrift in crème anglaise—because it’s there, and some day nobody will make this anymore. French bistros are at their best when they’re mom and pop, and Le Penguin feels even more agreeable when Suzanne Blech, the mom, shows up on busy nights to help out.

Photo: Courtesy of Casa Luca

Casa Luca's rack of lamb shoulder.

16. Casa Luca

Washington D.C.

Casual Italian's Gotten Bigger and Better

Casa Luca is a subtly sophisticated, exceptionally appealing restaurant with white-tile walls, comfy seating, fifties music, and black-and-white photos. Fabio Trabocchi, the chef and owner, calls it a casual Italian spot, but I thought it was spiffier than that, and I liked the food best when I didn’t think of it as Italian.

It’s not a place that sticks to Antipasti. Primo. Secundo. Casa Luca has many more categories—about eight or nine, by my figuring. For sure, all manner of antipasti are available, but after that the menu expands wildly, concluding with Family Style Favorites, which are the extra-jumbo dishes. I began Italian, with melting, mesmerizing prosciutto from the Mangalista pig, to me the best of the heritage porkers scampering around barnyards these days. The main courses are the highlights here, and more oversized than Italian ever gets.

The branzino was a monstrous filet, oven-roasted and crispy on top, accompanied by vegetables so succulent they were surely in the oven a lot longer than the fish. The dish of the night was a lamb shoulder rack—I never knew shoulder could be a rack. This was stunningly savory, marinated and slow-roasted, which meant it came to the table medium-rare and crisp, herbaceous and succulent, a stellar example of what rosemary, bay leaf, garlic and a talented chef can do. I never pass up affogato, traditionally espresso poured over vanilla gelato. Here it’s a variation on a sundae, chocolate sauce and mocha liqueur poured over the top. Who needs genuine Italian when you can have that?

Photo: Brian Liu/Courtesy of Daikaya

15. Daikaya

Washington D.C.

Your Sunday Brunch Gets an International Upgrade

Commonplace brunch is brutal, all those eggs cooked so many unfortunate ways. Daikaya’s is brilliant: Japanese-Jewish fusion—smoked salmon with rice balls. Filipino-Japanese fusion—braised pork hash with citrus-yuzu and an egg. Polish-Japanese fusion—stuffed cabbage with shiso. Harlem-Japanese fusion—fried chicken and waffles stuffed with red-bean paste. French-Japanese-Chesapeake Bay fusion—poached eggs on a thin muffin with croquettes plus a sprinkling of Old Bay and—this one never ends—Japanese-style Worcestershire sauce.

Washington D.C. has always boasted an abundance of international restaurants that offer what we used to call “foreign food,” but this is something else. It’s absolutely unfamiliar food, the most extraordinary I’ve seen, certainly this early in the day.

Chef Katsuya Fukushima serves his Sunday brunch on the second floor of a multi-level Japanese restaurant usually offering ramen below and izakaya above. He formerly worked for the Spanish chef José Andrés, a man of infinite inspirations, but Andrés never cooked this way. What’s not to miss? The French toast, thick and mesmerizingly sweet, made with brioche soaked overnight in cream and soy milk, caramelized in the cooking, and somehow ending up tasting like the greatest flan ever made. You should have it as dessert. Better yet, have it twice, at the beginning of your brunch and again at the end.

Photo: Michael Graydon Bon Appétit September 2013

Alma's tasting menu.

14. Alma

Los Angeles, CA

Culinary Wizardry Puts Down Roots in Downtown L.A.

How can you not love a place like this? It’s barely a restaurant. I’m surprised Alma is even permitted to call itself one. If you’re coming by car, you’ll probably drive right by. There’s no visible sign, so look for Club Las Palmas next door, offering billiards and hostesses, which at one time in America was all a man needed to find happiness.

Alma, once an ever-transient pop-up from chef Ari Taymor, is now settled permanently into a mostly abandoned building. The exterior appears to be made out of the same planks used to board up businesses at the approach of hurricanes. Inside, you’ll find everything a $5,000 renovation budget gets you: hanging bulbs, formica tables, benches, and molded plastic cantilever chairs. Alma appears to be trending upward, though. Now there’s a wine list, and it’s not cheap.

Taymor, a young chef with all the courage in the world and considerable talent to back it up, serves an idiosyncratic tasting menu, the kind that will both puzzle and thrill you. He’s particularly adept with salads and vegetables, my favorite consisting of compressed beets and apples, crushed hazelnuts and malted crème fraîche. There’s an egg yolk with smoked dates and intensely reduced sunchoke soup. He prepares sturgeon gorgeously, which isn’t easy, and the dominant herb is startling —pine tips. While his white-and-dark meat pressed chicken concoction reminded me a little too much of a Klondike bar, it exhibited a swell fancy touch. I don’t believe I’ve previously come upon such polished cooking in a restaurant where the customer bathroom and the staff locker room shared the same space.

Photo: Leann Mueller/Courtesy of La Barbecue

La Barbecue's ribs.

13. La Barbecue

Austin, TX

Everything You've Heard About Texas BBQ, but Better

There are only two kinds of barbecue joints. One has been around forever and each time you visit you’re praying the pitmaster hasn’t retired and the meat gone all to hell. The other kind has just opened and you know in your heart it’s not as good as the old kind, even though everyone is talking about it. La Barbecue is the exception, new and as thrilling as Cowtown Rodeo.

It isn’t pretty, that’s for sure. It subscribes to the new school of barbecue aesthetic, which means it’s almost a dump. You enter a compound with a dirt floor and chain-link fencing, pick up your food at a trailer, sit at a picnic table under what could be a second-hand revival tent, and hope the clouds overhead don’t spit cold rain on your ribs. All that’s missing is a junkyard dog. The barbeque is some of the best ever, as good as barbecue gets, maybe better if you’re talking brisket and beef sausage, the foundations of Texas barbecue.

That sausage, much like a knoblewurst and probably German in origin, is smoky, coarse, chewy, spicy and meaty, so good I nearly skipped the brisket, I was so full. That would have been heartbreaking. The brisket is so exquisite you can ask for it lean, usually a mistake, and it will come out soft and savory, not even close to dry. Get a slice on the fatty side and you’ll be asking yourself if this might be the greatest beef you ever ate.

Photo: Kyle Johnson

12. Bar Sajor

Seattle, WA

Laid-Back But Sophisticated—A Damn Good Place for a Romantic Night

You probably didn't know that pristine, washed-by-the-rains Seattle had a neighborhood like this: a little decadent, a little ancient, a little seedy, a couple of square blocks that might well be New Orleans transplanted to the Northwest. The reclamation is under way, and no part of it is more appealing than Bar Sajor, from chef Matt Dillon. It's one of the most unusual restaurants of the year, a casual place that feels ultra-elite.

The space is brightly lit, the room soaring, the ornamental touches so lovely I can't imagine a nicer spot for a first date. (Well, the boxy aerie reminds me of the seating area where wives and daughters are stashed during services in Orthodox synagogues.) At Bar Sajor, even the exposed pipes look good. The restaurant has two open kitchens, so welcoming that you might wonder if you're supposed to wander over and join the cooks. One is for cold food and the other for wood-grilling and wood-roasting.

Once you're seated, you'll be presented with hot tea in a Moroccan glass, one of the oddball but endearing eccentricities of the place. The banquettes are blue-striped, the wainscoting on the walls pure white, a little South of France. High overhead are shelves holding huge fermenting jars reached by a secret hatch in the wall behind them. The food emphasizes finesse and exquisite colors. You know that octopus can be soft and mild, as it is here, but you probably never thought of those not-so-lovely suckers as artistic. They're arranged like flower petals around the boundary of the plate. Chicken-liver mousse isn't just brown anymore, not when it's topped with thin strips of yellow squash and crisp sage leaves, and you'll no longer think of pork rillettes as ponderous after tasting this variation on a predictable dish. The specialty of the house is hard cider—among the choices you'll find gentle, sweet, and refreshing Montreuil from Normandy and dark, dry, and exotic Isastegi from Basque Country. The heavy, crunchy bread might be the lustiest food in the place, and the caramelized-butter ice cream is a masterpiece. I understand that everybody wants salted caramel these days, but try this and your passion might change.

Photo: Andres Gonzalez

Dungeness crab at Sir and Star.

11. Sir and Star at The Olema

Olema, CA

A Coastal Bounty of Old-Fashioned Taste

Margaret Gradé and Daniel DeLong were once famous, if only locally. They operated Manka's, an early-twentieth-century hunting lodge and restaurant that would have endured forever had it not burned down in 2006. Now they have Sir and Star, located in a once-shuttered inn, The Olema, located at the very end of a winding road about thirty-five miles from San Francisco and on the very edge of the Point Reyes National Seashore. Gradé looks like Joni Mitchell and talks like Annie Hall. I have no idea what DeLong looks like, since he didn't emerge from the kitchen the night a friend and I ate there. He cooks beautifully, in an old-time, happy-to-have-you-in-my-house sort of way.

I didn't know what to expect from the food, but it's the kind that's no longer commonplace—rich, generous, soothing, and in quantities large enough to fill your plate. The dining room is very plain, almost Shaker-like, although I don't believe Shakers settled out here—to my knowledge, they don't surf. I thought I'd have problems with the wine list, since it has only local wines from Marin County (plus champagne), but I found a 1999 Kalin Cellars Cuvée DD Pinot Noir, which had mature scents of berries and tobacco. The food is remarkably priced: Appetizers go for $10 to $12, main courses for $20, and sides for $5. My friend and I ordered the “O yes,” a tasting menu, and asked if our dishes could differ. Most restaurants refuse such a request, but not this one.

The Sablefish from Surrounding Seas—after a while you won't mind the cutesy menu alliterations—featured soft and sweet sablefish that seemed slightly smoked, bringing back delicatessen memories, although the smokiness turned out to be from an oyster sauce. Dungeness crab came with hollandaise, the real thing, so concentrated and intense I knew that eating it was a sin. Pair it with the 2008 Skywalker Chardonnay. A pork rib was much too fatty and luscious—in other words, just right—and on the same plate was a bit of pork jowl that made pork belly taste like spa food. As we left, Gradé handed each of us a little bag of caramel corn for the drive home. We could barely eat it, but of course we did.

Photo: Courtesy of Derek Richmond

Nico Osteria's Madai (snapper) crudo.

10. Nico Osteria

Chicago, IL

Sometimes All You Want is Italian Food, Exactly What You Love

Paul Kahan's food has always been more interesting than everyone else's, and just a little bit unusual, too. At Nico, he's done something out of character. The Italian menu he's conceived is familiar, what we crave. It's also faultless. He's opened the kind of restaurant we all hope to find in the heart of downtown, wherever we travel. You leave your hotel and there it is, precisely what you're in the mood to eat, not just at dinner but also at breakfast and lunch. Nico is open almost all the time.

The raw-fish preparations—crudo on the menu—are simpler than most, the seafood standing out. They combine something raw, something fruity, something crunchy, and (usually but not always) something spicy, just enough for heat to linger on the tongue. For me, escolar with avocado, blood orange, and capers is the irresistible crudo combination. The homemade pastas taste buttery. Try the fresh tagliolini with tiny clams. There are a few more ingredients than you'd find in Italy—leeks, tomato bits, and chiles—but not so many that the essential simplicity is lost. The seafood-and-chickpea minestrone with shrimp, squid, and clams was more like a stew than a soup, overstuffed with fish, and a not-to-be-missed dessert was the Nico Torte, a little like eating transcendent coffee cake at the end of the day. fflAt lunch, look for the porchetta sandwich. Pair it with the irregularly shaped, impeccably crunchy fingerling fries. Everyone is after breakthroughs in fried potatoes, and this is one. At breakfast, you should gear up for tripe and eggs, but if it's too early to stomach that, you'll have a wonderful time with the pastries, in particular kouign-amann, a crusty little caramelized cake, best topped with their ricotta-based cream. Nico might be Kahan going conventional, but the food doesn't taste that way.

Photo: Daniel Krieger

A full spread of Dover's Chicken for Two.

9. Dover

Brooklyn, NY

The Re-Invigoration of Fine Dining for a New Kind of Customer

It's said that fine dining is doomed, that it's too pretentious, too expensive, and too weighed down by tradition. Fewer and fewer diners care about elite eccentricities such as starched tablecloths that are re-ironed before service begins or parchment-thin wineglasses. Dover, rather ordinary in appearance, is the future of fine dining. It offers nothing in the way of froufrou but dazzles with an array of the luxurious food we love: oysters, lobster, and duck, as well as a truffled chicken entrée for two that comes in two courses, a preparation that's become a benchmark of haute cuisine.

This is the second establishment of chefs Joseph Ogrodnek and Walker Stern, unrelated to each other but as inescapably twinned as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. In 2011, Ogrodnek and Stern opened the wildly successful Battersby, and now they've moved up in culinary ambition. It wasn't that difficult. They once worked together at Alain Ducasse at The Essex House. Dover seats fifty-four, which is palatial by Brooklyn standards, but the furnishings are extraordinarily plain, the clientele is anything but well-dressed, much of the construction work was done by the chefs themselves, and you will almost certainly encounter a line when you visit the single restroom. (If you haven't read any food critics before your visit, fellow diners in line are an excellent source of culinary opinion.)

The chicken is not to be missed, but I also appreciated such retro classics as Caviar Pie, where blini are topped with American paddlefish caviar; cod grenobloise, essentially seafood in brown-butter sauce with capers; and warm oysters with sauce Choron, a béarnaise uplifted with tomato. You're not quite at Le Bernardin or Daniel when you dine here, not when you're seated at a table for two about twenty-two inches across, but Dover is not far removed. Let me convince you: The chicken for two opens with dark meat that resembles chicken salad but belongs to an alternative, truffled universe. Then comes the breast, formally presented tableside in a black Staub pan, then plated soft and silky, accompanied by grilled radicchio and a truffled gratin. That should get your interest. Maybe Michelin's, too.

Photo: Dylan + Jeni

The San Diego sea urchin with geoduck chowder at Orsa & Winston.

8. Orsa & Winston

Los Angeles, CA

Evereything Imaginable—Plus Uruguayan Rice

Orsa & Winston is a far-ranging restaurant that doesn't appear at first glance to be one, or maybe that's just what I've come to expect of small restaurants in downtown L.A. Here you will find not just small plates, the local standard, but almost every style of plating that larger restaurants have on hand. There's a pastry chef on premises, a real luxury these days. The wonderfully versatile Josef Centeno, who also operates the sensational Bäco Mercat, offers whatever you might wish—a five-course menu, a nine-course menu, an omakase menu (that word has jumped the language barrier), and what is today the rarest of all dining options, genuine bigness in his family-style meal. Orsa & Winston (named for his dogs) lacks nothing but enough space for everyone who wishes to dine there. It seats fewer than forty.

The tasting menu includes variations on the big four of small-plate dining—raw fish, fresh fruit, exotic sauces, and vivid greens. One such plate had kanpachi, grapefruit, yuzu kosho, and celery leaves. (Celery leaves are the farmers'-market garnish of the year, in drinks as well as in food.) Centeno's carne cruda is dry-aged, with Pecorino and truffled beef marrow. The Breakfast in a Shell is a coddled egg with sherry-spiked whipped cream, pancetta, maple syrup, chives, and rice, a so-called breakfast item more sweet than savory and more delicious than you can imagine. Centeno has sourced rice grown in Uruguay by a Japanese farmer for his elegant risotto with uni, geoduck, Pecorino-Romano cream, and micro shiso.

He understands how to play with flavors, textures, and contrasts, resulting in masterfully complicated comfort food. Imagine squid-ink spaghettini with Dungeness crab, uni butter, and charred kumquats, a shocking combination, unexpectedly right. The pastry is special, too, especially the blood-orange sorbet, cream, meringue, and basil, a miniature Pavlova; and the beyond-comprehension pear crostata with huckleberries, butterscotch-rosemary ice cream, and brown-butter crumble. Need more of an inducement to get in your car and drive there? In downtown L.A., one of the great re-emerging neighborhoods in this country, off-street parking still goes for about five bucks.

Photo: Courtesy of Angie Mosier

Gunshow's grilled Caesar steak tartare.

7. Gunshow

Atlanta, GA

They Come Bearing Food, One Cook After Another. Nobody Can Resist So Much Charm.

Gunshow has pulled off the improbable: It manages to be the most intimate restaurant in America without candles, flowers, or post-dinner petits fours. In fact, you've hardly ever come upon such stark simplicity—the floor is cement, and you sit at long, bare wooden communal tables held together with vise grips, hardly an ambience to suggest romance. You'll feel remarkably close to the cooks, who take the concept of food presentation to a new level of familiarity.

Gunshow is the latest in prep-kitchen chic, started a while ago at Brooklyn Fare. You don't order from the menu, although you are given one. Instead, an array of cooks come out to you, one by one, bearing trays of the food they've prepared. They're pretty much the head chefs of their own mini-kitchens. They bend over or go to their knees, offering small plates you can accept or decline. The problem is that you'll find the cooks so engaging and their food so diverse and tempting, you're likely to say yes to everything.

Nothing is scattershot, if you don't mind the pun. If it's meat you want, you might have the option of selecting from grilled lamb merguez with orange harissa, butternut-squash chimichurri, and brown-butter couscous; lamb vindaloo with raita; pork schnitzel with charred broccoli; beef tartare scented with anchovies and accompanied by grilled lettuce and Caesar dressing; or deep-fried quail with smoked-bourbon jus over tiny peas. I don't recall so many styles of cooking from one restaurant kitchen, and each dish is successful, because every cook specializes in the cuisine he or she knows best. You might think you're at a church supper where everyone in the parish goes to culinary school. I had to resist the urge to accept every dish that came my way. If I'd done that, I'd have been stuffed in thirty minutes. It's not just the cooks who try to benevolently impose their will. Our waitress noticed me pondering two wines and asked if I would please pick the Côte-Rôtie because she hadn't had it before. I wanted to ask her to sit down and join us for dinner, and I'm not certain she would have refused.

Sean Brock's Plate of Southern Vegetables at Husk in Nashville.

6. Husk

Nashville, TN

Pork. Oysters. Grits. Bourbon. All the Best of Sourthern Cooking, Elevated to a New Level.

Husk in Nashville brilliantly achieves Sean Brock's goal, to modernize and perfect southern food. Although the first Husk, in Charleston, and this second Husk are alike in appearance, situated in historic buildings with lengthy porches, and have many menu similarities, it's the Nashville Husk that's the more impressive.

I never thought Brock found the greatness he was after at the first Husk—although others did. He sure found it here. The food expresses the wonderful softness, sensuality, and homeyness of traditional southern cooking and adds to that the vividness that comes from well-sourced products allowed to express their superiority. Brock's quail stuffed with a crumbled pork-and-rice mixture, sitting in a quail jus smoky from sausage drippings and enriched by the yolk of an egg, might be the best southern dish I've ever been served.

An entrée of southern vegetables—heritage vegetables are at the heart of his cooking—included grits in a cup with strips of red pepper and a poached egg on top, as well as fresh corn cooked on embers, dressed with basil and lime, and enriched with sheep's-milk cheese. A marrow bone came in a miniature cast-iron pan, accompanied by sweet onion relish and biscuits, a quirky combination I wouldn't have admired with any biscuits less flaky and fluffy than these. Warm oysters on the half shell with a butter sauce of green garlic, lovage, and preserved lemon could be repositioned as the escargots of the South. I'm just a northerner, but it strikes me that Husk in Nashville has found the pathway to better southern cooking, transforming it with an abundance of finesse.

Photo: Andrew Thomas Lee

King + Duke's grilled artichoke.

5. King + Duke

Atlanta, GA

Where There's Smoke, There's Grilling, as All-American as a Slab of Swordfish

You've certainly dined in a multitude of restaurants that positioned themselves as “modern American grills.” Like me, you might have ceased caring what this was ever supposed to mean. I walked into King + Duke with a friend and immediately found it attractive. Even so, I didn't expect much to come of our casual dinner. King + Duke didn't appear fundamentally different from other places that cook over wood. It was. In the middle of the meal, I sat up straight and thought, This is the one. This is informal American dining, perfected.

King + Duke—named after characters in Huckleberry Finn—has an endless bar, an open kitchen that seems to stretch as far as a football field, and a huge outdoor patio set up for eating in warm weather. There are comfy banquettes, padded chairs, hardwood floors, and charmingly attentive servers. When aren't they that way in the South? The modern American food comforts with southern touches and startles with English ones. Restaurants today love to charge for bread. Here each guest receives a complimentary Yorkshire pudding.

Slow-roasted lamb belly rose to prominence this year, but this tender, luscious candied preparation dazzled above all others. Duck breast boasts the beefiness of steak. Swordfish from Block Island—I often think of grilled swordfish as the signature American fish—is cut so thick it develops a crust during grilling. Mine came with corn, field peas, and black-eyed peas. The desserts tend to be rich beyond comprehension. Go for the pulverizingly perfect sticky toffee pudding, another English beauty.

I should have figured out that something special awaited me back when I was walking through the plaza on Peachtree Road on my way to the restaurant and ran into a delightful wall of wood smoke. Usually that means that barbecue lies dead ahead, but King + Duke does something far more memorable. Grilling over wood reminds us of the backyard cookouts and family camping trips so essential to our lives, allows food to speak with an American accent.

Photo: Filip Wolak

At Carbone, waiters prepare the Caesar salad tableside.

4. Carbone

New York, NY

The Little Italy-Style Joint You Dreamed of Discovering, Right Down to the Veal Parm

Once, Italian-American (or Bronx-Italian) food was something special, but it seemed to be on the threshold of extinction until Carbone came to the rescue. Italian-American was the signature food of America throughout most of the twentieth century, with its oversize meatballs, overstuffed pastas, and oversauced cutlets, one more extravagantly satisfying than the next. It was the American interpretation of how Italians ate, and it helped define our culture. When Michael Corleone shot and killed a corrupt Irish-American cop in The Godfather, he did it in an Italian-American restaurant in the Bronx.

Carbone might be the best Italian-American restaurant of all time; it's almost certainly the most expensive and probably the most sophisticated, even if it has wacky nostalgic touches here and there. The waiters are in crimson tudos and speak in a Bronx patois (“Ya know,” “Ya got it”). The soundtrack features glorious Italianate songs, such as Julius La Rosa's 1953 “Eh, Cumpari.”It's all guaranteed to make you smile. Of greater importance, co-chefs Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi have re-invigorated Italian-American cuisine, which has a reputation for being ridiculously heavy—because it usually is ridiculously heavy. It isn't that way here, except in the case of the whopping veal parmigiana, so huge it could double as an anchor should you wish an enemy to sleep with the fishes.

Mostly the food is extraordinarily and unexpectedly restrained, as with tortellini in ragù, the pasta rings stuffed with sheep's-milk ricotta and sitting atop a creamy, pale red sauce made with beef, veal, pork, and lardo. The gently pan-crisped halibut is totally modern, presented with a scattering of vegetables, fragile squash blossoms among them. (Usually squash blossoms are stuffed with cheese and possess the heft of bocce balls.) Every cook working in every Little Italy in every American city should be required to eat here.

Roe stands out, quietly. It's the understated restaurant of the year: modest, lovely, detail-oriented, rather shy. You come in, take your seat, and prepare yourself for little more than very good wine and exquisite food. No dramatics here. Not many restaurants in Portland are blessed with such restraint.

The two of us sat at the bar, where the lengthier of two tasting menus is offered—seven courses, mostly seafood, quite Japanese, for $95, one of the best bargains you're going to find. Before us was a low dark-wood barrier that separated us from the three cooks behind the counter. They were working furiously, totally engrossed, never looking up, never saying a word to us and not many to one another.

We made no new friends, but that didn't stop us from loving the food. The combinations are exquisitely ecuted: arctic-char roe in a watercress emulsion, the crunch of tobiko over shaved foie gras. At the start, the courses flowed into one another, in tune, seamless. Then came contrasts, one of them mostly French, sea bass in a sauce grenobloise, the comeback French preparation of the year.

One dessert was a pan-roasted Seckel pear with salted praline-caramel popcorn and crème anglaise. The wines for the night are presented on the menu, selected to match the food, but should you wish something special, you need only ask. Roe is located in the rear of a larger restaurant called Block + Tackle, but it's totally sealed off, the door the sort you find in genetic-engineering laboratories, constructed so that no molecule in one room can escape to the other.

This being Portland, the room has exposed pipes across the ceiling, but all else is uncharacteristically restrained. The walls are very Japanese, a hand-painted cherry-blossom tree depicted on one, a serene paneled ink drawing hanging on the other. Don't worry about being in the presence of so much tranquillity. Perfection is so rare it has an excitement all its own.

Photo: Misha Gravenor

Ludo Lefebvre (center) in his open kitchen at Trois Mec.

2. Trois Mec

Los Angeles, CA

A Little Piece of Paris in an L.A. Strip Mall

They stand outside, mingling, talking, waiting for the door to open, for their moment to come. If you don't know what to expect from Ludo Lefebvre's Trois Mec, and I had no idea, you might think you're in the wrong place—the sign overhead reads Raffallo's Pizza & Italian Foods. The joint could well be an underground Italian social club, guys hanging around, hands in pockets, hoping to get inside. Okay, girls, too.

Trois Mec is the toughest ticket in a town where a lot of places are that way. It seems like a pop-up, which Lefebvre knows how to do better than anybody else, but inside, the place promises permanence. There's marble everywhere, even underfoot, plus new ovens, a new grill, all the trimmings. (That old-time pizza sign is considered too wonderful to replace.) Lefebvre does a tasting menu, little plates that incorporate a lot of French touches, somewhat suggestive of those found in the neo-bistros that have swept Paris in recent years, starry food served in less-than-sterling settings. There's classic technique here, which is that French thing, understandable inasmuch as Lefebvre comes from just outside Chablis.

Nothing you will eat tastes conventional: The “snacks,” which would be called amuse-bouches in a fancier place, are shockingly intense, a wake-up for the meal ahead. The buckwheat popcorn with rice-vinegar powder quickly got my attention, convincing me that the struggle to get in was worth the effort. Later dishes are more delicate—tweezers and squeeze bottles are in sight—but there's also that grill, where you'll watch cabbage go up in flames for a dish that includes bone-marrow flan, cured egg, and smoked-almond-milk crème anglaise. His version of raw beef layered with caramelized eggplant and smoky yogurt is really just an extreme play on beef tartare. The end of the meal heralds the arrival of remarkable petits fours, the magic one a mini éclair with hazelnut buttercream and candied chestnut. If you can't get in—and few succeed—be patient. Lefebvre is planning a simpler French spot in the abandoned Tasty Thai restaurant next door.

Photo: Bonjwing Lee

Qui's côte de boeuf, with Texas Wagyu rib eye.

1. Qui

Austin, TX

Tasty Texan and Uplifted Asian Cooking On the Other Side of Austin

On the long-overlooked east side of Austin stands the most fascinating new restaurant in America. Thanks to Paul Qui and other local chefs, what used to be the toughest part of town is now the tastiest. Qui's high-end restaurant could be mistaken for a sushi bar but isn't one—you'll realize it's more than that when you see the vast, gleaming open kitchen where he prepares food displaying an array of Asian and Texan influences. Most unusual and daring are dishes from the Philippines, where Qui was born. These include dinuguan, a pork-blood stew containing mushrooms, meat, and potato gnocchi. The pork blood didn't shock me, but the gnocchi did—do they really make pillowy pasta in the Philippines? His Ode to Michel Bras pays homage to the famous foraging French chef and is one of the best vegetable dishes of the year, a compilation of fresh and pickled products such as cucumbers, radishes, black-fennel fronds, wood sorrel, roasted garlic, and onion jam, all suspended in a cool turnip-dashi puree. (The shocking price: $9.)

Qui's talent is prodigious, and his food is filled with both subtle shadings and sheer sensationalism. You might be offered a preserved green peach or the belly of a sea bream. Local tastes are well represented, too. Texas-bred Wagyu rib eye and dry-aged côte de boeuf. There's also beef tartare, which wanders far from cattle country—it's spiced with kimchi. The dining area, as well as the freestanding building, is reminiscent of the two Austin sushi spots that made Qui famous, Uchi and Uchiko. Qui has blond-wood slats inside and out, which is very Japanese, and white stucco outside, which is very Southwest.

A blazingly original cross-cultural dish is his taco of sea eel, scrambled eggs, trout roe, and kale. The same goes for his uplifted version of halo-halo, the Philippine iced drink—this one is stuffed with pumpkin custard, rice pudding, candied pecans, and passion fruit. You're unlikely to have eaten a taco anything like this one or sipped a halo-halo quite so upscale. If Paul Qui isn't the most fearless chef in America, he's surely the most confident.